It was a fun intro. When I watched it as a kid, I was really disappointed at the animation, which was so static, and even then I noticed the weird stilted pacing.
I keep hoping, now that we have CGI, that we’ll see Arex’s species in a new Trek at some point. (The three-armed helmsman.) I mean, hey, they’ve acknowledged Yesteryear and the Kzinti, so TAS is slowly slipping into canon…
Didn’t this come up in various episodes in various incarnations of star trek?
I seem to recall the black ooze episode of TNG where Yar dies ending like this.
In Yesteryear, the guy giving the report on Spock’s past over the viewscreen is the saddest looking dude I’ve ever seen. Why so sad, laddie?
I wonder if they could “remake” the series in CGI using the original dubbing? (Or just better 2D animation.)
On a technical level I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be all that hard or expensive.
On a legal level, I shudder to think of all the various permissions from multiple now-defunct and sold companies they would have to obtain.
Just judging from the first episode, I like the look and feel of the 2D animation. I know I said I lay a lot of the atmosphere of the first episode on the excellent music, but the 2D look and feel of the show has a lot to do with it as well. I like it.
When I worked at OMNI, I remember my editor telling me that Paramount had purchased the rights to use the original crew actors’ likenesses for CGI recreations in Star Trek properties in perpetuity. This wasn’t publicized, and it may not kick in until after the actors’ deaths. It seemed far-fetched in 1994, not so much now.
Of course, given the churn in the Trek offices and movement of creative control around Paramount/CBS/etc. the current Trek showrunners may not even be aware of this.
But I had the same thought – it’d be awesome to take the audio/stories from TAS and redo them with good CGI animation. I want to see the scene where they attached the Enterprise and the D-7 to each other – I remember recreating that with the AMD models when I was a kid. :)
Are we doing 2 episodes per week?
“Yesteryear”
I don’t know what exactly I was expecting from this series, but I wasn’t expecting to be this impressed. This week’s episode starts us at the world we last saw in The City on the Edge of Forever, where the Federation is studying the Guardian of Forever. And that immediately makes sense! Because of course the Federation would use such a device to try to study history, and possibly observe history.
I really liked the time travel twist here. Kirk and Spock step out from the past back to the present, and no one on the Enterprise crew recognizes Spock anymore. Somehow his going back in time and observing without interfering has changed the timeline enough that Spock died at the age of 7, as did his mother, and the Enterprise instead has an Andorian first officer.
Spock apparently died while taking a Vulcan ritual at age 7 in this timeline. I love this twist, in that in his timeline, he remembers a cousin helping him, and he comes to the conclusion that the cousin must have been himself going back in time. I love that. So the original timeline that we all know is one in which Spock was saved by himself from the future, and since he was in the past observing something for Starfleet, he wasn’t in his own past rescuing himself, which caused the change.
I’m actually kind of surprised that Starfleet would authorize this mission where Spock goes back and tries to save himself. I bet it was Kirk approving the mission without going up the chain of command. Because, honestly, the act of saving young Spock is changing the “pure” timeline without interference. In the “true” timeline he was meant to die, right?
All this happens in the first 4 minutes, by the way. One thing I really appreciate about the animated series is the efficiency of story-telling. They’re telling the same story they would have taken an hour to tell, but they’re using half that time instead. The rest of the episode is about Spock’s actual mission into his past. It turns out Spock has a pet saber-tooth bear. And it looks like this takes place before they adopted his sister Michael.
I thought the episode really did a great job of hitting the emotional notes it needed to, showing the turmoil inside young Spock between his human and Vulcan selves, while not getting melodramatic. The music in this episode is again doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They really ramp up the speed of the music for the appropriate action scenes and the emotional scenes. It’s really so different from regular Trek music that I’m used to hearing, so it’s very noticeable, and yet, it’s also really good.
There is a line at the very end by McCoy which ambiguously implies that the Spock who returns is different from the Spock he knows because he made a joke. This could just be McCoy being his usual curmudgeonly self, or it could be that the Spock who lost his pet at Age 7 was a bit more humorless than the Spock we know. But he has now been replaced with the one we know! So wait, what happened to the more humorless Spock? Wait, I’d better not think about this too hard, time travel headache coming on.
I seem to recall that it is mentioned in a TOS episode that Spock had a pet as a child? Maybe by his mother?
Nice to see some concern for continuity there.
There are some real howlers in the Animated Series, but there are some solid episodes too. It is just sooo hard to get past the awful animation.
“Yesteryear” by DC Fontana
Yes, yes, yes. I really liked this one with the exception of the voice actor for Young Spock. Just typical shit child actor. (Holy Crap… apparently this is his website: http://whimsicalwill.tripod.com/)
The time travel stuff was pretty rote, but I very much enjoyed to interplay between Adult Spock, his parents, and young Spock. Especially with how it handled the injury and death of I-Chaya. I had no memory of this episode, so I was shocked with the Vulcan healer was like, “Nope. There’s nothing we can do. He’s going to die.”
About that comment by McCoy at the end. It never dawned on my that it was a hint that perhaps Spock WAS different after coming back. However they do appear to have made a point that I-Chaya didn’t die in the original timeline. Hmmmm.
Highlights:
Man, you made me laugh so hard I’m getting strange looks from my co-worker.
Really enjoyed seeing this again. My adult memories of TAS were basically this episode, the Tribble episode, and the awesome episode where they attached the Klingon D-7 to the Enterprise in the exact same configuration my friend Charlie and I used with our AMT models when I was 8.
This episode was inspired by Amanda’s comment in Journey to Babel. Roddenberry didn’t want TAS to be official Trek continuity, but this episode was probably the first one to be directly referenced by future Treks. Many references from it are used in the Enterprise 3-part story “The Forge,” and the bullying scene was recreated in the ST:2009 film.
Just a heads up. My paid subscription expired this morning, which was just in time because today is apparently the last day you can use these coupon codes. I used GIFT to subscribe for a month, then went to the account page, and I had an option to redeem coupon, which I used to input ENJOY, which gave me another free month, so I’m good for another 2 commercial free months, until June 23rd.
Thanks for letting me know about ENJOY, I’d missed that one!
Also I’m enjoying these recaps. I loved this show when I was a kid, though I haven’t really ever tried to go back to it beyond watching the “Tribble” sequel that was packaged with the DS9 episode on the TOS DVD’s.
“One of Our Planets is Missing”
The beginning of this episode has a one sentence setup that caused me to spiral into hours of thought since I saw this episode. They spotted a gaseous cloud entering the galaxy and sent the Enterprise to investigate it. Just think about that for a second. Here on Earth, we look up at the stars, and any phenomenon we spot are like looking back at the past. There’s that nebula that existed like that 250 million years ago, which is how long its light took to get to us. There’s a star that went super nova there 300 million years ago, and its light just got to us. But here, thanks to warp travel and having colonized so much of space, I guess we’re close enough to the edge of the galaxy that we can spot a gaseous cloud coming into the galaxy and send a ship to investigate! Mind blown.
The gaseous cloud in question is soon determined to be pretty dangerous as it consumes planets. It’s a great episode because it takes this science fiction concept seriously and tries to work through the implications of something like that being an intelligent being. When the enterprise is trapped inside the cloud, and the cloud is heading for a Federation colony, Kirk brings up having to kill it, which brings up objections from Spock about potentially killing an intelligent being. Incidentally the head of the colony is someone who used to be in Starfleet, and we saw him take over the Enterprise for a bit in the episode The Ultimate Computer in Season 2 (remember when the Enterprise was turned over to be flown by a computer?)
There’s two bits of nice drama in this episode: the cloud creature itself, and the colony that’s going to be destroyed, leaving only enough time to evacuate a handful of people.
I really liked that Kirk, Spock and McCoy reach to find a peaceful solution, trying to communicate with the creature. Spock reaches out in a mind-meld routed through the computer’s universal translator. I loved the scene where the creature is hearing from inside its own body, Spock trying to convince it that it has swallowed intelligent creatures. It made me think how I would react in such a situation. If I’m eating a piece of fruit, and parts of the fruit start communicating with me about how I’m destroying a whole colony of advanced beings in the fruit? Get the hell outta here with that shit, right? That’s why I liked the solution to be that the creature actually got to inhabit Spock’s body and see everything from a humanoid perspective for a bit. It would be like me getting to experience the colonies living in the fruit I was eating.
A great episode overall. Kirk, Spock and McCoy all got a nice role here, and I really enjoyed thinking about these concepts, big and small, which is something I always enjoy with good science fiction.
Also, a quick note: I loved the scenes with Scotty and engineering, and how they handled using chunks of material for fuel for the enterprise. That scene looked way better than anything in the original series, because it’s much easier to draw cool looking engineering doodads than to actually create props and equipment that looks like that for filming purposes.
This episode turned me off initially because it appeared to be the same as “The Immunity Syndrome” (AKA. “The Space Amoeba”) from TOS. But further in, I have to say, I really loved how they handled the stakes. Yeah, sure, the Enterprise is in danger. What else is new? But what’s this? A Federation Colony, too? Ok, that complicated things.
But what makes it an excellent episode is how those stakes are framed in agonizingly personal terms. I love how a good portion of the episode is looking at the human cost of not stopping that thing. About how evacuation will only go so far. And the choices those on the planet have to make. It comes down to 5000 saved. 80 Million lost. And then the following exchange:
KIRK: Bob, where’s Katie?
BOB: She’s here with me.
KIRK: Don’t worry, Bob. She’ll be aright. Goodbye.
BOB: Goodbye, Jim.
MCCOY: Who’s Katie?
KIRK: His daughter. She’s eleven.
5000 children saved, but his daughter isn’t one of them. So good.